ICTlogy

Scott Leslie posts about the Wikiversity:

a free, open learning environment and research community. Online courses are being created as a form of co-operative and interactive exchange of knowledge

Some days ago Yan Simard and I had some interesting discussion about learning objects repositories vs. the power of the Internet by itself (enhanced by Google or other search engines) to act as a repository.

Well, I think the Wikiversity comes up to complicate things.
Simplifying quite a bit, I thing there are four kinds of free content (I wouldn’t call all of them learning objects) repositories:

• Learning objects repositories in the pure sense of the word, such as Careo or Maricopa’s MLX
• The Wikiversity, the Wikipedia and other wikis
• Open educational directories from education institutions, such as MIT OpenCourseWare or Berklee Shares
• The Internet itself + search engines

Forgive me for putting it that simple.
The question is that we’ve been talking and talking about folksonomies and it looks like what we make converge (categories) in one side we make it diverge the other side (repositories).

No, I don’t have any alternative, nor a clue. Just thinking out loud and sharing what I think is quite a big problem. At least, in the F/OSS field, even if there’s a huge diversity, you know that you have to be souceforged if you want to exist.

The Sofia project is an open content initiative launched by the Foothill – De Anza Community College District with funding support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Under the leadership of Foothill College, Sofia promotes faculty and institutional sharing of online content. Modeled after MIT’s OpenCourseWare Initiative, Sofia encourages the free exchange of community college-level materials on the World Wide Web. It is our hope that Sofia will lead to the exploration of ways of supporting instruction and student learning using web-based resources.

• Sofia, Sharing Of Free Intellectual Assets

[via EduResources Portal]

I’ve known about Janet E. Salmons’s Taxonomy of Collaborative E-Learning. In a very simple but very very illustrative chart she points five levels of collaboration in an e-learning activity

• Dialogue
• Peer review
• Parallel
• Sequential
• Synergistic

each one involving more or less exchange of ideas between learners, including how this exchange happens in time.

I think I’ll use just the same taxonomy but on the other side of e-learning: in the teachers’ side. I know in most training projects (virtual or offline) there usually is one and only one teacher. But in e-learning for development (above all in our experience) collusion of different e-teachers is becoming a must, especially when these e-teachers are online volunteers.

Taxonomy of Collaborative E-Learning 1.0 (433 Kb)

I’m leaving my actual hosting and domain parking to Veloxia. If
you’re reading this, you’re already pointing to the new one. Hope
everything will be ok and noone will notice the change.

PS: I’m sorry the folks at Server Spain did not work fine for me :(

E-learning on a Shoestring – Developing a Solution, an article by Frankie Forsyth to develop low-cost e-learning projects based on F/OSS LMS such as Moodle. Something I’ve talked about sometimes. Adding online volunteers and free content makes it just possible for NGOs and nonprofits working in the field of cooperation for development.

I really liked the e-toolkit figure in page 9.

All the document is very clear and really practical.
Case studies are concise and selfexplanatory. Just that: (good) examples.

E-learning on a Shoestring – Developing a Solution (1.74 Mb)

[via OLDaily]

Situated Learning in Online Courses, by Susan Smith Nash:

“Situated learning” is a term popularized by Lave and Wenger (1991), and it refers to the kind of cognitive activity and knowledge acquisition that takes place in an apprenticeship-type setting. It emphasizes the following elements: content, real life, and mentoring. It involves developing an awareness of both tacit and explicit knowledge

Now that in the Campus for Peace we’re revising out methodological approach for e-learning for development, this article will help us in the role of the mentor, which is a strong point in the whole process.